The Lord's Household Artillery: Text: Psalm 127:3-5
Introduction: A Generation at War
We live in a sentimental age, which is another way of saying we live in a cowardly age. Our generation wants Christianity to be a soft thing, a plush thing, a comfortable thing. We want Jesus to be a celestial guidance counselor who affirms our choices and never, ever makes demands that might interfere with our 401(k)s. And nowhere is this sentimentalism more corrosive than in our view of the family. We have reduced the biblical family to a kind of Hallmark Channel greeting card: a tidy house, two smiling kids, a golden retriever, and no higher ambition than achieving a comfortable suburban quietude. We treat children as accessories to our self-fulfillment, rather than as the central task of our lives.
But the Bible will not have it. The biblical family is not a soft, sentimental thing. It is a militant thing. It is an outpost of the kingdom, a boot camp, an armory. And children are not cuddly pets to make us feel good about ourselves. They are weapons. They are arrows. They are the Lord's household artillery.
Psalm 127, taken as a whole, is a thunderous rebuke to our entire modern project of frantic, godless striving. The first two verses lay the foundation: unless the Lord builds the house, you are just a fool with a hammer. Unless the Lord guards the city, your night watchmen are just sipping coffee and wasting time. All your anxious toil, your early mornings and late nights, is vanity. It is worthless. God gives to His beloved sleep. And then, having demolished our secular pretensions to self-sufficiency, the psalmist immediately turns to the primary way in which God does build His house. And how is that? It is through children.
This is not a side project. This is not a hobby for those who are "into that sort of thing." This is God's central strategy for taking territory and advancing His kingdom in history. Our secular, anti-natalist culture sees children as a burden, a carbon-footprint liability, an impediment to career and personal freedom. God sees them as a reward, an inheritance, and the essential ammunition for a long-term cultural war. We have to decide whose definition we are going to live by.
The Text
Behold, children are an inheritance of Yahweh,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
How blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them;
They will not be ashamed
When they speak with enemies in the gate.
(Psalm 127:3-5 LSB)
God's Building Materials (v. 3)
We begin with the foundational premise in verse 3:
"Behold, children are an inheritance of Yahweh, The fruit of the womb is a reward." (Psalm 127:3)
The psalmist begins with "Behold," which is the biblical equivalent of grabbing you by the lapels and telling you to pay attention. This is important. This is not a minor detail. This is the hinge on which God's household-building project turns. Children are an "inheritance." The word means a heritage, a possession, a portion assigned by God. They are not first and foremost ours; they are the Lord's. He entrusts them to us. We are stewards, not owners. This demolishes the pagan notion that children are the property of the parents to do with as they please, and it equally demolishes the modern statist notion that children are the property of the government to be molded into compliant cogs for the machine.
They are Yahweh's inheritance. This means that when we receive a child, we are receiving a gift, a trust, directly from the hand of the sovereign God. Our task is not to shape them in our own image, but in His. Our goal is not to raise successful accountants or happy atheists, but to raise faithful servants of the living God. Because they belong to Him, they must be raised for Him.
And they are a "reward." In a world that sees children as a financial drain and a career obstacle, the Word of God declares them to be a prize, a wage, a blessing. This is a direct confrontation with the spirit of our age. The world says, "Children cost you." God says, "Children enrich you." The world says, "Children tie you down." God says, "Children are your legacy." The entire birth control mentality, which treats fertility as a disease to be managed and children as a problem to be avoided, is a flat-out rejection of this verse. It is to look at God's proffered reward and say, "No, thank you, I'd rather have a boat."
This reward is not automatic, of course. The first two verses of the psalm still apply. A man can receive this inheritance and squander it. He can receive this reward and turn it into a curse through faithless parenting. Unless the Lord builds the child, the parents labor in vain. But the raw material, the potential for glory, is a direct gift from God.
The Ammunition of the Covenant (v. 4)
Verse 4 gives us the central metaphor, and it is a military one.
"Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth." (Psalm 127:4 LSB)
This is where all our sentimentalism about children evaporates. Children are not teddy bears. They are not Precious Moments figurines. They are arrows. Arrows are not for decoration. They are not for keeping in the quiver to admire. Arrows are offensive weapons. They are designed to be shaped, aimed, and shot at a target, specifically, at the enemy. A warrior with a quiver full of arrows is not a defensive player. He is equipped for the attack.
This means that Christian parenting is the art of spiritual archery. A father is a warrior, and his task is to fletch his arrows. He must shape them, straighten them, sharpen their points, and prepare them for flight. This is what Christian education is. This is what family worship is. This is what discipline is. It is the careful, diligent, daily work of preparing your children to be launched into the world as projectiles for the kingdom of Christ. You are not raising them to stay in the quiver. You are raising them to fly true and strike deep.
Notice that they are the "children of one's youth." There is a particular potency to the children born to a young man. He has the vigor and strength to raise them, and by the time he is in his prime, contending for the future of his city, his firstborn sons are grown men standing beside him. This is a multi-generational vision. It is a long-term strategy. The world thinks in terms of election cycles. The Christian must think in terms of generations.
The Showdown at the Gate (v. 5)
The psalm concludes by showing us where this battle takes place. It is not on some distant, foreign battlefield. It is a domestic dispute.
"How blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them; They will not be ashamed When they speak with enemies in the gate." (Psalm 127:5 LSB)
First, the blessing. "How blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them." This is not talking about a man who has two arrows and calls it good. This is a man whose quiver is full. God loves abundance. He loves fruitfulness. He told Adam to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. This is the Dominion Mandate, and it has never been rescinded. A full quiver is a sign of God's favor and a source of immense strategic strength.
And where is that strength deployed? "When they speak with enemies in the gate." The gate of an ancient city was the seat of government. It was the courthouse, the city council chamber, and the public square all in one. This is where civic life was ordered, where justice was dispensed, and where cultural battles were fought and won. And the conflict described here is not with foreign invaders. It is with domestic adversaries. It is a civil conflict. The enemies are inside the city.
And who is at the gate? A man and his sons. The picture is of a patriarch, a father, contending for righteousness in the public square. He is arguing a case, debating a policy, resisting a wicked initiative. And as he speaks, he is not alone. Standing with him, shoulder to shoulder, are his grown sons. They are his backup. They are his credibility. They are his legacy. They are on his side. He has not raised soldiers for the enemy. He has raised a loyal cohort that multiplies his strength and ensures that his fight will continue after he is gone.
This is the vision. It is a father, faithful to God's covenant, who has raised his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He has shaped them into sharp, straight arrows. And when the time comes to confront the councils of the ungodly, the school boards promoting filth, the city councils beholden to wickedness, he does not go alone. His quiver is with him. And because he has been faithful, and because his sons are faithful, he will not be put to shame. He has a posse. His enemies, who thought he was just one old man, suddenly realize they are facing an army.
Conclusion: Fletching Arrows for Christ
Our culture is crumbling because Christian men abandoned the gates. We retreated into our pietistic hobbit-holes, tended to our private spiritualities, and handed the levers of culture over to the enemy. And we did this, in large part, because we forgot what children are for.
We thought they were for our own personal enjoyment. We failed to see that they were God's primary weapons for the long-term project of discipling the nations. We gave them over to be catechized by the state and entertained by Hollywood, and then we were shocked when they grew up and joined the other side. We raised the enemy's soldiers in our own homes.
The way back is the way of this psalm. It begins with repentance for our anxious, godless toil and our contempt for God's gift of children. It requires us to see our homes not as places of retreat from the world, but as armories for the conquest of the world. It requires fathers to take up their duty as warriors and arrow-makers. It requires a long, patient, generational view of victory.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the great warrior, the mighty man who builds His house. And He builds it with living stones, with children raised in faith. He is the one who will ultimately confront all His enemies in the gate of the New Jerusalem. And on that day, blessed will be the man who can present to the Lord his full quiver, his faithful children, and say, "Here am I, and the children whom You have given me."